Run-Up Re-Education

So, with my entry to the WoA III, I plan on polishing up my skills in preparation. I haven't done any real game work that actually had a end-user-like UI in a few years, just lots of backend stuff and non-game-like UIs.

I'm reinstalling Blender, reviewing my old Unity experiments, and experimenting a bunch with what Unity does and doesn't give me "for free", because I never plumbed those depths in my prior experiments. Turns out, not only does Unity import UV texture materials quite easily, but it will also import an animation timeline and play it back with zero effort.

Things to master in the next few weeks, so I know them when I need them... * Figure out how to create multiple named animation sequences in Blender, * How to access and drive them in Unity, * Whether Unity imports empties, so I can attach objects to them, * How to swap out textures used by a given model, * and how to do parameterized shaders, so I can do "palette swapping"-like effects.

And of course, get my hands wet in Blender again. I may have been using it on and off since 2001, but it's a pretty complex moving target to keep track of. There's probably some new tricks in the latest version, that weren't there when I last used the software for more than two hours in a month (which IIRC was 2011).

Naturally I'm not producing resources or even a game concept ahead of time. I'm just cracking my knuckles, stretching my muscles, and recalling how this bicycle's seat is supposed to fit.